


here comes the end

by formytroubledmind



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-06
Updated: 2021-03-06
Packaged: 2021-03-12 01:13:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,265
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29876829
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/formytroubledmind/pseuds/formytroubledmind
Summary: the end of the world seems like a lifetime ago. and maybe, maybe it was.in which humanity's strongest lives out his days in the kind of quiet domesticity that he could get very used to.
Relationships: Levi Ackerman & Erwin Smith & Mike Zacharias & Hange Zoë, Levi Ackerman/Erwin Smith, Levi Ackerman/Special Operations Squad | Squad Levi, levi & everyone else i guess
Comments: 4
Kudos: 12





	here comes the end

in another life levi would have told you about the scars on his hands, his missing phalanges and fingers, or why even one of his eyes was milky-white and unseeing.

but for now he wipes the children’s desks and sweeps the classrooms after them and listens to their laughter at the end of long days. he has no claim to titles now, no humanity’s strongest, no wings upon his back - on the farm he’s known affectionately by his first name and he wore simple, unassuming clothes. sometimes an ascot, but only if the occasion called for it. otherwise it got in the way: he’d unfortunately this discovered first hand, the children would pull on it with their grubby fingers and he didn’t live this long just to be garrotted by an enthusiastic baby. he didn’t care much for younger ones, who were always sticky and crying, but once they reached around six and learnt some semblance of personal hygiene and communicated in semi-intelligible sentences they were tolerable, even good company. 

they remind them of people he’s known before - at night the sounds of the creaky building and its inhabitants echoed with what could almost be the comfortable noise of the corps.if he closed his eyes it was like being back in that house at the end of the walls so many years ago, the little hideout they could never get clean. at meal times the jostling feels like being at the corps’ mess hall again, where he’d sat at the officer’s table, watching half-disgusted but strangely awed at how the braus child inhaled her food, watching the childish rivalry between the two boys, now long gone. when one girl walked in wearing a red scarf his breath had hitched.

the days pass without incident and he’s beginning to enjoy the routine he’s built for himself: up at the crack of dawn, a quick wash before he starts preparing the breakfast, a longer wash after the children have eaten and streamed out of the dining hall to their classes, after he’d pushed in the chairs and arranged the tables and packed up the leftovers for later. on alternate days he takes the older ones out for a run, right around the old noblemens’ lands where the freshly planted grass was soft and dewy under their feet. as they leap over brooks and crunch through forested paths he tells them to keep their form straight and heads up, to not stop running— though it was okay if they slowed down, just don’t _stop_ —and a certain sternness returns in those moments. it’s possible to why he might be intimidating despite his statue. and how exacting he is, when it comes to it.

when the children ask him if he’s married he merely shows them his missing ring finger. how would i wear a ring? he asks, as they cling onto his stubby hands and look up with him with questioning eyes. he lets them climb over him, pulls them onto his shoulders. he thinks about a lifetime ago: sun hot on his cheeks, the humid air solemn and heavy, tiles crunching under his feet as he takes slow, leaden, steps away from his commander. dedicating his heart.

but i’ve been in love, he says to himself, but they’ve already lost interest, fiddling with their toys and gone off from the table.

oi, he says, trying to be stern. clear your plates. don’t you remember what we’ve taught you?

when the older ones — as old as _they_ were then, he supposes — come to him, sulky and in need of a good talking to, he sits them down in his office and offers them tea. one time a particularly agitated boy had thrown it down, shattering the cup, and he feels himself ready some blunt words. but he stops himself. he doesn’t say anything about the time he kicked a kid’s face open to save him - he was barely older than the boy sat before him now. about how he said then that he would never be controlled, that he was a monster. sometimes he thinks he was right then. maybe he should have seen it coming all along.

but instead he looks at him and says: i understand if you’ve got to be angry. but this is for your sake. you have to trust that we’re gonna protect you.

the seething anger that he’s met with is still as familiar and inscrutable all at once, but he thinks now maybe he should have seen the signs. it wasn’t good to let it fester - not till the boy was old enough to be carried away with his own notions of what to do. but then again, he could see why. maybe everything had lead them to this point all along.

he sometimes listens in to classes. what he realises now was that hange was primarily a biologist, with her babbling about the body and its systems and her passion for the natural world. she might have dabbled in physics - it took some precision engineering to devise thunder spears, but above all what he remembers was her love for science and discovery. he sees that in them now, the curiosity and eagerness to learn, and it makes him smile, even if he does it quietly when no one is looking. sometimes he has to resist the urge to ruffle their hair.

he still hates the rain. when the children pull at his hands and ask him to splash in puddles with them he always resists. he tells them that the rain makes him annoyed because it gets everything wet and slimy and the children always come back muddy, but historia catches his eye and gives a knowing look. in actuality the rain makes him sad. it had been raining that day too, when he’d slipped in and out of consciousness in hange’s arms - when he’d almost grasped erwin again - but in the end it wasn’t time yet, and now he was here. everyone would have to wait a bit more.

sometimes he wishes, amid chopping up of vegetables for stew and wrangling the little ones into bed, that he could share this domesticity with someone — anyone — look, how easy it could have been. look at how these small actions add up to a life.

standing by the sink with suds up to his elbows, he thinks that maybe in the end it wasn’t meant to be grand gestures and decisions which weighed heavy on the fate of the world. he thinks maybe it meant soft touches against shoulders, barely hidden smiles, letting the children pull at him and picking them up for hugs, despite how he really didn’t appreciate all the slobber that they produced when they got sleepy and how their heads lolled against his neck with hair tickling his face. in moments where he shuts the door to their bedrooms he gets the same swell in his chest, the same knowing what to do - what he should be doing, anyway. the dishes clink as he rinses them off and sets them on the rack. 

-

one day, some of them - the usual trio who were always bothering him, not that he minded too much - come to him. levi, they say. levi, tell us about _you._

nosy brats, he says, deadpan, but he tells them about _his_ trio, him, isabel and farlan. about the people from a lifetime ago: about erwin, about hange, about mike and nanaba and petra and his first squad. and of course, about his last: sasha and jean and connie, armin and mikasa and eren.


End file.
